The Republican | Mark M. Murray02.07.2012 | AGAWAM - A framed photo of Lisa Ziegert sits along with a collection of angel statues on a bookcase at her parents' home.

REMEMBERING LISAHere are some upcoming events to celebrate the life of Lisa Ziegert.April 12: 2 p.m., Rebecca G. Doering School, 68 Main St., Agawam, dedication of tree plantingApril 14: 2 p.m., Agawam Public Library, "Lisa's Corner," story time for younger childrenApril 15: 11 a.m., In back of Agawam Public Library, celebration, open to friends and public to share thoughts and memories, rain or shine

No suspect has ever been identified. Never caught. Never punished. Yet.

On April 15 two decades will have passed since someone took 24-year-old Lisa Ziegert from her job at a gift shop in Agawam, then raped and killed the aspiring teacher with a vicious stabbing to the neck. She was left in the woods, her body found four days later on Easter Sunday 1992.

To this day, family and friends live with the horror of Lisa’s death and the memories of the joy she exuded in life.

“You have two choices when something like this happens,” says her mother, Diane “Dee” Ziegert. “You either let it take over your life and destroy you, and so they win twice. Or, you can live your life as best as you can, although it is not the same.”

For the Ziegert family, faith has been crucial in enduring the past 20 years without answers; “I don’t know how people go through this who do not have belief. I know she’s safe,” Dee Ziegert said recently.

Family and friends want the perpetrator caught and punished. So, too, do investigators who were first called to Brittany’s Card and Gift Shoppe on Walnut Street Extension in Agawam on the morning of April 16, 1992. A shop employee had arrived for work to find the store unlocked and Lisa’s car still in the parking lot; she had been working the night before.

Agawam Police Chief Robert D. Campbell can recite the facts of the case as if it happened a week ago; back then, he was the head of his department’s detective bureau and toiled with about 30 investigators, including some from the FBI, to track leads in finding Lisa Ziegert’s killer.

“I’ve lived this since 1992,” he said. “There were so many leads.”

“If you saw the files on this thing, you would measure it in pounds not pages,” Campbell said. “The twists and the turns, the ups and the downs this investigation has taken, it’s a case that’s never far from everyone’s mind. There’s not a cop here who wouldn’t want to see this solved.”

State Police Capt. Peter J. Higgins agrees; he, too, was there when it happened and now heads the detective unit assigned to the Hampden district attorney’s office. All unsolved homicide cases are important, but Ziegert’s death touched a particular nerve among investigators and the community at large, according to Higgins.

“In the public eye, they equate it with a brother, a daughter, a sister, working in a business like this somewhere in this area. That’s why they related to how tragic this was,” Higgins said.

District Attorney Mark G. Mastroianni, like his predecessor, William M. Bennett, is dedicated to solving the case. Mastroianni and Higgins recently met with the Ziegerts, and the district attorney’s office has identified the case as one which has some forensic evidence that could be reexamined or reevaluated.

The Ziegerts are committed to helping investigators in any way they can. Parents Dee and George Ziegert have not changed their telephone number in two decades, even when they moved from one house to another in Agawam. They don’t want to take any chance someone might get in touch with them with an important lead.

The 1993 NBC episode of “Unsolved Mysteries” – which includes a 9-minute segment on Lisa Ziegert’s killing – is still rebroadcast on TV occasionally, and their telephone number is included.

The family’s hope for resolution is still tinged with some anger: “When you think of these 20 years that this person has got to live free. They’re able to go on with their lives, but it’s OK to take someone else’s,” George Ziegert said recently.

Dee Ziegert believes Mastroianni to be “a very dedicated man who is very much into forensics and science and the modern way of going with solving it, because science has progressed so much.”

Will new testing of evidence bring new hope for a resolution, she is asked.

“We’d love to get our hopes up. We’ve been on the roller coaster for almost 20 years,” she said. “You expected it to be solved in the beginning. There was so much. There was actually two scenes, and there was forensic evidence, things that could be collected.”

George Ziegert said he feels many victim’s families have a fear the killer will be found but not convicted because “the police didn’t dot an ‘I’ or cross a ‘T.’” In his daughter’s case, he believes investigators “will be ultra-careful.”

The family has dealt with potential suspects in the past, only to have hopes for resolution dashed. “We needed (hope); the only thing that got you out of that terrible horrible thing (is that) the hope got you going, along with your family that you had to be there for,” Dee Ziegert said.

At the time of her death, Lisa, a graduate of Westfield State University, worked days as a teaching assistant at Agawam Middle School and on nights and weekends at the card shop, where she enjoyed being with people. She lived in an apartment on Belton Court in Agawam with a longtime girlfriend.

“She was such a good person,” her mother remembers. “She loved people. Why would someone want to hurt her like that?”

Elder sister, Lynne, was 25 at the time. She may have been among the last people to see Lisa alive, having stopped at the store to chat at about 7 p.m. on the night of her disappearance.

“She was fine. She was in a fine mood. She was talking about school,” Lynne Ziegert Rogerson remembers. “My God the kids (at her school) adored her.”

There was never any worry about Lisa working at the store, according to her sister. “There was nothing about that area that made me uneasy,” she said.

Only 15 months apart in age, Lynne and Lisa Ziegert were always close, companionably growing up in the same bedroom of the family homestead where Rogerson now lives with her own family.

Their brother, David Ziegert, was 21 at the time and in California, where he still lives with his wife and three sons.

Their younger sister, Sharon, was a 17-year-old high-school senior. She now lives in eastern Massachusetts with her husband and two children.

Lisa’s missed each of her siblings’ weddings, but the family works now to ensure the latest generation of the Ziegert family knows who she was.

“They know Auntie Lisa is in heaven, that Auntie Lisa looks out for them,” Dee Ziegert says of her grandchildren. “We’ve been blessed with good friends and wonderful family and a lot of support that kept Lisa alive, and that’s a beautiful thing.”

Submitted photoHOW TO HELPAnyone with information about the abduction and death of Lisa Ziegert in 1992 should contact Massachusetts State Police.Call: (413) 505-5933Text-a-Tip: Text 274637, start with the word "solve" and write the tip

Dee Ziegert was 48 when her middle daughter was killed. She made a decision early on to become the public face for Lisa in hopes it would help the case get solved.

Testaments to Lisa – photographs and teddy bears – abound in the family home and at places across Agawam where balloons have been released in her memory, where there have been vigils and where events are still held to raise funds for a memorial which bears Lisa’s name.

A $10,000 donation helped install an 18-foot mural by artist Ted C. Esselstyn in the children’s area in the Agawam Public Library. Musical instruments, computers, software for the visually impaired, scholarships and other items have been donated to city schools.

Some $75,000 raised in golf tournaments and other fund-raisers in Lisa’s memory has been distributed, according to George Ziegert.

At the time of her sister’s death, Lynne Ziegert Rogerson was still single, living in a house off River Road in Agawam with some good friends from high school. Lisa began dating one of the men in the house so the sisters were very much in each other’s life.

Rogerson can remember the call she received at her job at Hamilton Sundstrand from a friend and co-worker of Lisa’s at the card shop, inquiring if she had seen Lisa that morning so long ago. The family rushed to the store, she said, but they were not allowed inside. They returned to the family home where police began questioning them.

Later, maps were spread out on a big table in the dining room as searches began by family friends.

“A bunch of the guys got together, and they split the maps and they all went out looking,” said Rogerson. She worked “to stay strong for my folks” and worried about the effects on her younger sister, she added.

“My mom obsessively cleaned that whole time,” Rogerson said. “I think she washed the kitchen floor a half dozen times at least in those couple of days to stay busy.”

On that Easter Sunday, now-retired Agawam detective Wayne K. Macey came to the home to deliver the news of discovery of Lisa’s body.

Rogerson said she and her parents wanted to know everything, all the details with nothing held back. “I wanted to know,” she said. “It was not because I was looking to have some gruesome picture in my head. The not knowing, or the guessing, or the speculating, was worse than knowing the truth.”

She can recall being obsessed about what the police may not have been telling her, Rogerson said, and she obsessed about whether Lisa’s killer was someone known to the family. She’s never considered it was an arbitrary killing.

“It is someone we all know; it is someone she met through the store. Was there a stalker that she had?” Rogerson said.

Lisa’s wake, held over two days, was testament to the support of friends and the community, but it was also exhausting. “I hate the smell of lilies now,” Rogerson says. “I call them the death flower. That’s what I associate with the smell of lilies now, Lisa’s wake.”

She opted not to view her sister in death; “I preferred older memories than one I couldn’t get rid of. There was damage. She’d been out in the elements. I just couldn’t do it.”

For a while Rogerson would visit her sister’s grave and sit alone, wailing. That pain has eased.

“I think that people, in general, believe tragedies like that destroy a family. That’s one thing that never happened,” Rogerson said. “I think we had such a solid family and solid friendships and support through the whole thing.”

Kim Souders-Murray and Lisa Ziegert had been fast friends since a sixth-grade reading class, where they both were reprimanded for kicking the boy who sat between them.

Souders-Murray, now an educator herself, was living in Framingham when her friend went missing. Alerted by a family member, she hit the Massachusetts Turnpike immediately for the trip to Agawam. She can remember praying her friend would be found alive and worrying about little things, like whether Lisa had her contact lens solution with her.

The two had visited together in the card store a week before Ziegert disappeared, and Souders-Murray recalls her friend sharing that she felt like she was being watched. Generally, though, Lisa was “so happy,” Souders-Murray said.

Her friend’s killing changed her life, Souders-Murray said. “I felt unsafe for years,” she said. She distanced herself from her male friends; “I went to ground,” she said.

To this day, Souders-Murray said, she’s not so good at friendships. “I lost my best friend,” she said. “I really miss the girl she was. I miss the woman she would have become. Whoever did this needs to be in jail for the rest of their life.”

The Ziegerts have not been alone in their journey over the past twenty years, helped in many ways by people who have been through the same, or similar, grief.

Nancy Larson, whose 19-year-old son, Danny Larson, was killed in Holyoke on Feb. 10, 1991, is now a good friend. Two men received life sentences for killing her son.

Magi and John Bish, parents of Molly Bish, are “just wonderful,” according to George and Dee Ziegert. They’ve also befriended Holly Piirainen’s grandmother.

“It’s a club you don’t want to get into, but you appreciate the people who are in it. When they say, ‘I understand,’ they understand,” Dee Ziegert said.

Molly Bish, 16, disappeared June 28, 2000, from her lifeguard post at Comins Pond in Warren. Her remains were identified in June 2003; no one has been charged in the killing.

Piirainen, 10, of Grafton, was abducted from Sturbridge, while visiting her grandmother on Aug. 5, 1993. Her body was found in Brimfield on Oct. 23 of that year.

Piirainen’s case returned to the headlines earlier this year when Mastroianni announced his office had submitted material for forensic testing. The new testing provided a viable lead, which is being followed.

What would it mean for the Ziegerts to have the person who killed their daughter captured and convicted?

George and Dee Ziegert respond almost simultaneously, “Justice for Lisa. And, for our other kids, so they know.”

“It would be such a statement,” Dee Ziegert said. “I don’t care how long it is; we won’t give up and we will get you. Law enforcement won’t give up, the DA’s office won’t give up and we, as a family, will not stop.”